


if you were here beside me

by magnusbbanes



Category: Daredevil (TV)
Genre: Angst, M/M, matt is emo af
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-13
Updated: 2016-04-13
Packaged: 2018-06-02 01:34:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,784
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6545098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/magnusbbanes/pseuds/magnusbbanes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Foggy has left for Seattle a month ago, and Matt likes to pretend Foggy doesn’t exist altogether.</p>
            </blockquote>





	if you were here beside me

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from the song "New York" by Snow Patrol.  
> Dedicated to my dear friend Leticia.
> 
> A small playlist:  
> \- New York by Snow Patrol.  
> \- Come Back When You Can by Barcelona.  
> \- I and Love and You by The Avett Brothers.  
> \- The Ballad of Love and Hate by The Avett Brothers.

More often that not, Matt wakes up thinking his day isn’t going to end well. He’s surprised when it does, although there is nuance to bring to his definition of “well”. “Well” is not getting into a fight with any of the bad people inhabiting Hell’s Kitchen. “Well” is not having to go see Claire to get patched up, _again_. “Well” is having a bad day that’s not as bad as it could be, in retrospect.

 **

Karen calls him every time he doesn’t show up to the office, which is often. She asks how he’s doing, with a lot of worry in her voice, and he lies, as per usual.

“Do you think you might be able to come ‘round tomorrow? We need to look over that one case I told you about.”

“Sure,” he says once, and for the first time in a while, he isn’t lying. He has to go sometime, doesn’t he? “I’ll bring breakfast.”

“That’s sweet Matt, thank you.”

There’s silence on the line for a few seconds, and Matt knows what it means.

“You know he’s coming back, right? He won’t be gone for-”

“See you tomorrow Karen.”

He hangs up, rude and cold, and he wishes he hadn’t. Karen doesn’t deserve to be caught in his and Foggy’s crossfire. She’s nice to him, caring and sweet. She worries, and he doesn’t help. But something tightens in his chest every time she tries to talk about _it_ , and he feels too weak to even try to have that conversation. Foggy’s left for Seattle a month ago, and Matt likes to pretend Foggy doesn’t exist altogether. For some reason, it’s easier than thinking he might show up unannounced that day, or the day after, or another day after.

 **

It’s crazy to think that if he’d been more careful, less reckless, Foggy would still be here with him. They would still be going out every other night for a drink at Josie’s, would still get chinese take-out at the office, would still sleep in Matt’s bed after Foggy helped him out of his clothes (even though Matt can do it by himself) and crashed there, exhausted after a day of work. He thinks a lot about this, about his mistakes and about the rise in Foggy’s voice when he’d discovered Matt’s identity, and then the choked up noises of someone who felt betrayed and let-down by the person they loved the most. Matt doesn’t get a lot of sleep anymore.

 **

One morning, he wakes up to hear the distinctive noise of Karen’s heartbeat waiting in his living room. It sounds anxious and uncomfortable, like it usually does lately when she’s around Matt. He puts on a pair of jogging pants, and goes to sit on his sofa. He can see the red and orange blurry shape of her standing in front of him. Softly, she hands him something.

“This was in the mail for you this morning. I didn’t open it, don’t worry.”

Matt takes it and feels around the edges of the envelope; it’s rather large.

“It’s from Foggy.”

His chest hurts at the name, and his heartbeat is deafening in his own ears.

“Thank you Karen,” Matt says, his voice close to a whisper.

He hears her smile, and she leans down and kisses the top of his head, a hand resting on his shoulder. He didn’t realize until then how much he’d needed a friendly touch. She leaves without a word.

Matt holds the envelope in his hands for a long time. He sometimes puts it down on his coffee table, just to pick it up again a few seconds later. He eventually opens it, making sure he doesn’t rip anything in the process. The paper inside it feels heavier than regular paper. He knows why. When Foggy and him write each other letters, Foggy gets his translated in braille for Matt, so he doesn’t have to get someone to read them to him. He makes a sad smile that he’s glad Karen isn’t here to see. Delicately, as if he’s never done this before, he puts his fingers to the paper and starts reading.

_In case number 1 02 17, it is of my professional opinion that the defendant should be…_

It takes a couple of seconds for it to dawn on Matt. This isn’t a letter Foggy wrote to tell him about how he’s doing, much less to ask Matt how _he_ is doing. This is Foggy’s input on whatever case they’re working on right now and that Matt hasn’t been keeping up with because he can’t work properly since his best friend is gone. This feels worse than if Foggy had written him to say he wasn’t coming back. Worse than if he hadn’t written at all. Matt doesn’t throw away the letter. He might read it later. He puts it down on the coffee table and goes back to bed.

 **

A couple of days later, Matt figures he hasn’t worn his vigilante outfit in a while. He doesn’t prepare, doesn’t exercise beforehand; he just puts on his black costume and heads out into the night, hoping he’ll stumble upon some criminals he’d be happy to beat up. Matt hasn’t been listening to the television lately. He doesn’t know if there are any new villains he should be taking care of, or complaints of multiple robberies happening in a particular district. He’s not going out to fight for the safety of anyone, or to be the standard-bearer of a cause. He’s left his apartment to find someone he can let out all his rage and sadness on, and call it crime-fighting.

It doesn’t take long into the night before Matt hears a woman’s voice rising in volume as he approaches an intersection. A man’s threatening her, and he can hear both of their heartbeats, which express two very different things: the woman’s is scared, but has a hint of fight-or-flight to it; meanwhile, the man’s is an alternation of excitement and rage. Matt hears the sound of a fist hitting flesh, a cry of pain, and in a second, he’s jumping off the roof and onto the man a few stories below.

When it’s done, Matt can taste blood on his tongue. A few drops of it must have gone into his mouth while he was beating the guy up. The woman’s heartbeast is still there, still panicking, but not because of imminent danger. She seems surprised, but anxious at the same time. Shocked. Matt wipes at the blood on his lips, and he knows he’s made a pulp out of the face of the man under his hands.

“You should go,” he says. The woman’s heartbeat jolts. She probably hadn’t expected him to talk. He hears her stand up from where she’d fallen after being hit. Her breath is shaky, but her panic is slowly going away.

“Th-Thanks,” she replies. She takes a turn at the intersection, and she’s gone.

When he comes home, Matt goes and takes a hot shower. The water stings where the man has managed to hit him. He feels around his body and knows he’ll have bruises on his abdomen, as well as on his face. His bottom lip is slightly cut, the top of his left cheek also. He goes to bed realizing that there’s still a feeling of emptiness inside him that even violence couldn’t make disappear.

 **

It’s another month into Foggy’s absence (Matt counts the days, makes a mental note of them), and Matt is barely getting used to it when one night, he hears the lock of his front door opening. He jumps out of bed, focusing on any noise coming from outside of his room. He hears a _thud_ , like something heavy being put down on the floor; then a few steps, and a quiet sigh.

It’s the sigh that makes him freeze, when he was about ready to burst into his living room. He knows that sigh. He’s heard it countless times, over drinks after having been stood-up, over a case that was hard to crack, or right there on his sofa, ready to go to bed. And then Matt hears the pitter-patter of a heart he feels he’s known his entire life. His own heart seems stuck in his throat, with the sound of it echoing in his ears, intertwined with the heartbeat coming from the other side of his bedroom’s door. He runs a hand hastily through his hair, rubs his eyes for a long time. He thinks it must be a dream, somehow. Matt doesn’t dream usually, though, so it doesn’t make much sense. But it has to be. The opposite is too inimaginable for him now to even conceive. And yet he hears footsteps again, and the way they sound on the floor makes him choke back a sob.

Matt takes a deep breath before going up to his door and sliding it open. The footsteps stop, so he stops as well. Foggy is standing behind the kitchen counter, and Matt can feel him staring. He doesn’t know what to say, doesn’t know what to do. He doesn’t have a plan for this situation because he’d convinced himself that it would never happen. Foggy was _gone_. Foggy didn’t exist in his life anymore. So why was he in his apartment in the middle of the night, his heart rate as fast as Matt’s?

“I let myself in,” Foggy says, and hearing his voice feels like hearing for the first time after an awful accident.

Matt takes a few second before answering, still processing the fact that this is actually happening, that he’s not dreaming. At least he hopes so.

“I guessed that.”

Foggy’s heartbeat slows down after hearing Matt’s voice.

“I’m sorry if I woke you up.”

“I wasn’t sleeping.” _And even if I were, I’m glad you did_ , he doesn’t add.

They stay where they’re standing for a minute or two, both obviously not knowing what they should do. Then Matt takes a few steps and goes to sit on his couch, his back to Foggy. The silence seems to last an eternity before Foggy speaks again.

“How are things at the office?”

Matt snorts quietly at this.

“I don’t know,” is the short answer he gives. _A fucking mess since you’ve been gone, because I can’t work properly without my best friend who also happens to be the rock I need to lean on but pretend I don’t because I’m an idiot_ is the long answer.

Suddenly, Foggy is making his way toward the couch, and Matt doesn’t have to focus very hard to notice his best friend’s rage.

“You don’t _know_?” Foggy asks, barely keeping in his anger. Matt knows Foggy is clenching his jaw, hard, gritting his teeth together so he doesn’t shout at him. He knows Foggy doesn’t want to yell, not now, not when they haven’t been in the same room for two months and sixteen days. Foggy flops down on the chair facing the sofa. Foggy’s chair. Matt hates it when other people sit there. “How do you not know?”

“I couldn’t go, Foggy, ok?,” he lets out, almost unintentionally. He’s said it too fast, so he knows how it makes him sound. Desperate, barely holding on to what he has left. _Weak_.

There’s silence again, so Matt takes it as his hint to continue. “I couldn’t go because Karen kept saying how you’d be back, and for a while I tried to convince myself that you would but you never were. Clients coming at our door to beg for our help and I asked her to turn them down because Nelson was gone and it was only Murdock and how do we sell a whole to something that’s actually cut in half?”

He’s out of breath by the time he’s finished, and he hates that he can’t see Foggy’s face properly, that it’s just a blur of orange and red, with specks of gold here and there that don’t appear around anyone else’s silhouette and that he can’t explain. Matt wishes, now more than ever before, that he could see Foggy, that he could look at him and see if his best friend is hurting as much as he does. It’s an incredibly selfish thought to have, but he wants to know, beyond the sound of a heartbeat, if his words are making their mark on Foggy’s face.

Matt hears Foggy standing up, and then feels his added weight on the couch next to him. It’s a blur, but he sees Foggy’s hand going up to his left cheek, his thumb grazing the tiny scar he got there from his fight a month back.

“This one’s new, isn’t it?,” Foggy asks, gentle. Matt knows Foggy’s annoyed by that new scar. He hates it, even. But there’s fondness, not only in his tone but in his touch, and Matt thinks about how much he’s missed those hands, the particular warmth of them, the way they seem to vibrate against his skin.

“It is. Some guy was being an asshole and I-”

“You know,” Foggy says, standing up, and starting to pace around the room, “I don’t- I don’t wanna talk about the guy you beat up or the fact that you put yourself in danger again when I wasn’t here, I really don’t.”

He seems exhausted all of a sudden, like he’s run around the block fifty times in a row.

“I wanna talk about how when I left, I did it because I couldn’t handle-” Matt figures Foggy is probably wildly gesturing toward him. “And I was in Seattle for two months because-”

“Two months and sixteen days,” Matt interrupts.

Foggy grunts.

“I was in Seattle for two months because I thought it’d do me some good to be far from work, to be far from New York, to be far from-”

_To be far from you_ , Matt thinks.

“And then, guess what?!,” and Matt notices that Foggy’s heartbeat is rising up again. “It didn’t do me _any good_. At all. Because I kept thinking about the fact that I was there, and you were here, and we were far from each other for the first time in years, and it- it fucked me up.”

Matt’s eyes sting, his stomach is in knots, and his chest feels warm. He feels Foggy’s weight on the couch again, and then Foggy’s hands are taking his and holding them tight.

“It was, undoubtedly, the worst decision I’ve ever made in my whole life. I don’t blame myself for needing a breather, but I left you, and I know I-”

Matt lifts up one hand to Foggy’s face and kisses him, gently. He doesn’t think he’s ever kissed someone this way before. It feels like he’s putting back pieces of something that was broken for a long time, but just needed attention. Foggy kisses him back, and he thinks that his chest might burst open. He feels around the edges of Foggy’s face, under his chin and down his nose, over his brow and down the curve of his ears.

“I was gone, too,” Matt whispers, their foreheads touching. “I think I forgot what was- what was really important to me, and I lost myself into other things, and I’m sorry.”

He kisses Foggy again, and leans into his friend’s body. He figures he doesn’t want to call him a friend anymore. He also figures they haven’t been friends for a long time; it had just taken them a while to realize it. He feels Foggy’s arm wrap around him, and Matt knows he doesn’t want to be anywhere else. This, right here, is where he truly belongs. Foggy kisses the top of his head, and it makes Matt smile against his chest.

“I-” Foggy starts, hesitant. “I wanna talk more. About all of this.”

Matt looks up at him and smiles again. He never smiles more than when he’s with Foggy, it seems.

“Me too.”

This time, Foggy is the one who smiles.

**

  
It’s been a month, and Matt now wakes up feeling okay. He thinks about the cases piling up at the office, about what he hears on the news and what he should do about it before it gets worse, and about calling Claire when his ribs hurt after a fight. But mostly, he thinks about Foggy Nelson waking up next to him every morning, and then helping him get dressed (even though he _really_ doesn’t need help), making him coffee and holding his arm all the way to work, and everywhere they go. He thinks about being in the dark everyday, with the person he loves the most lighting the way.


End file.
